Revealed: How Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus move collapsed
Alessandro Moggi is the son of Luciano, the former general director of the Old Lady who was banned from football for match fixing in 2006. At that time his son Alessandro was the general manager of GEA, a company of football agents.
“Cristiano Ronaldo was offered to Parma and Lazio but they rejected a chance to sign him”, Moggi said.
“Juventus wanted to sign him and I travelled to Lisbon with Jorge Mendes [Ronaldo was playing with Sporting Lisbon at the time]. The idea was to make a swap deal with Marcelo Salas as Juventus wanted to sell him. Trouble is, Portuguese football wasn’t too interesting at the time and we didn’t manage to persuade Salas to move to Portugal.”
“Contracts and papers were ready, Ronaldo was happy because in that moment Juventus were one of the best teams in Europe. That day we could have changed the history of European football, maybe Ronaldo could have still been a Juventus player. This is not my biggest regret, however, as Ronaldinho came also close to joining Juve in the past.”